Heartbeats
by melissaisdown
Summary: Synopsis:  Sometimes it lasts in love. Sometimes it hurts instead.  Set five years after season seven. Ignores everything following "After Hours."
1. heartstrings

Notes: Set 5 years after season 7 and ignores everything after "After Hours." Reviews are welcome. Thanks for reading.

**Heart****strings**

The crowded elevator, an impromptu rendezvous.

She can feel him watching her, one motionless stare on the outskirts of her periphery. Cuddy fights the urge to look back immediately but on the next floor three people step out and the curious stranger is beside her as much as behind her. He leans heavy on a cane and her heart flits arrhythmic at the hope. On the next floor she gets off, never turning confrontational. The man says nothing and, just like before, she doesn't look back.

_**trial and error**_

After settling in at Boston Children's following an interim of maternity leave, Cuddy practiced endocrinology a while, basking in the bracketed shifts with fewer hours and the long overdue return to medicine. At the end of two years though, she was bored. She loved the time at home she had, making dinner for her daughters, the certainty of holidays off and all that came with the 9 to 5 routine. But the more patients she saw, the accumulation of charts she signed and filed away only reminded her why she sought to be Dean to begin with and it seemed a small concession to move again when she was offered a Director position at New York Mercy.

Maybe she was trying to prove her ambition never faded. Maybe the brightness of motherhood had dissolved into a lackluster banality. Maybe she liked the idea of being within driving distance of Princeton. She was pining for so much and regretting even more.

Out of the din of the hospital, phones ringing, patients wailing, EKGs beeping and elevators chiming, she hears his voice. She hears him holler, distant but distinct, impatient for a nurse.

Cuddy rushes toward the voice, unsure what it means. It could be residual guilt or cruel coincidence. She steps into an unlit room. He's there but different. The beard is thick and overgrown so that she almost doesn't recognize him. She turns the light on to quell her disbelief and her heart cringes at the intense reality of seeing him after so long.

His eyes flash up at her, that unforgiving cobalt blue. His wide brow, with its ten thousand plots and plans, has narrowed; he's aged from within. Yet there are no casual furrows of worry, no self pity for the lonely man in the hospital bed, just a drawn asceticism from some silent self-set struggle, or a long illness.

"House? What are you doing here?"

He looks down at his right arm.

"Wristband says I'm a patient."

"Whose?"

"Dr. Ross,' they're running tests to see if I qualify for a clinical trial."

"A clinical trial for what?"

Cuddy's train of thought collides with a brick wall. She knows the hospital is only performing two right now. One is for ALS, the other terminal cancer. She picks up his chart.

"New cancer medication."

"What? How long–– House, how long have you been sick?"

"Five years."

He watches the shock filling Cuddy's face turn to disgust.

"The tumors that were excised from my thigh? That a precursor. It took about four months, the paraneoplastic syndrome came. By then the cancer had spread. Wilson's cocktail of drugs worked for a while. Then it didn't anymore. He recommended this trial."

"How long have you been here?"

"Checked in yesterday. What about you?"

"I've been Director here almost three years."

A nurse hovering in the doorway interrupts.

"We have to take you to radiology now, Mr. House."

He nods as the nurse brings in a wheelchair.

"We'll catch up later," he tells Cuddy. "You know where to find me."

Cuddy's left standing at the bottom of his empty hospital bed feeling the worst hypocrite. She left him when he needed her, citing that same flaw in him. It all seems so insignificant now. He said he could do better and she never let him try. She left out of fear, the expectation of his failure.

Tonight when she goes home and tucks her two daughters into bed, she wonders what's been denied them, how their lives might have been moulded if he'd remained in them and the faintest hope of how they still might be.

The next day she goes to him as early as her schedule allows. House isn't awake yet but she can't leave. Her silhouette is staring at him from the bottom of the bed when he opens his eyes. I thought I lost you, she thinks. And he can read her that way because his glance says yesterday you found me. The chaos theory of their lives is circular. Michigan, Princeton. This is just déjà vu again.

"You are officially in the trial," she tells him.

"But they told me I wasn't an ideal candidate, that my tests were borderline. I was supposed to go onto a waiting list."

"You're in. A nurse will be up soon to escort you to begin the first phase of treatment."

Cuddy reaches out and brushes his hand in an impersonal farewell. It's transparent though, how afraid she is of getting too close too late. She turns and starts always.

"Cuddy," he shouts. He means to say thank you but his stolid veneer can only manage, "Wish me luck."

"Good luck, House."

_**a safe return (to the way things were)**_

Late the next day she finds him in his bed stabbing a baked potato through to the cafeteria tray.

"How's the trial going?" She asks, expecting some complaint or a jibe back about it only being his second day.

"You tell me," he replies instead. He knows she's spent the last two days researching it.

"Ross had a lot of success with the first round of patients. And he's made improvements to the compound so we're expecting unprecedented results."

She sighs, feeling like she's just read a tagline for the pharmaceutical.

"You should thank Wilson for suggesting it."

"I really didn't know you would be here," he admits, stepping on her lines. As if knowing and showing up anyway would have been the worst offense.

Cuddy's silent a beat. She know it's the truth, knows that it doesn't really matter. Her heart is breaking for all of it and watching him eat the travesty the kitchen makes of a TV dinner exacerbates her remorse.

"You've got to be sick of hospital food. Why don't you have dinner with me tonight?"

House cants his head, pretending not to be blindsided by the offer.

"I'll order takeout," she gestures toward the tiny TV in the corner of the ceiling, "You can watch a real TV."

He hesitates. He knows what's happening. The want's come out of remission. He can't fight it, it's her.

Cuddy, the undertow he'll always be caught in.

House nods finally and for the first time since he's arrived, Cuddy smiles.

It takes him a while to dress. They meet outside her office. She stops by her favorite Thai place and they drive about twenty minutes outside the city to a massive brownstone on the corner of a picturesque suburban block.

They almost feel like a couple again, staggering together through the threshold of the door into the familiar ember warmth of her foyer. The girls are asleep by now. Cuddy thanks the babysitter and locks the door.

Then she goes into the kitchen to get silverware and plates but House doesn't follow. He stands stuck a minute in the hall, at some kind of crossroads. A light fringe of snow has settled like a cape on the shoulders of his coat.

When she comes back to the living room, she finds and hands him the remote and he sits on the couch opposite the chair she's sunk into. He half props his leg on a pillow and reaches for the bag of takeout.

Cuddy has no idea what to say. She never anticipated this being so difficult. The television flickers, audible but not loud. House gnaws on plain rice noodles. He's not really hungry. He's not really watching the TV. He's examining the framed family portraits, Rachel's yearbook picture, how she's grown and––

"What's her name?" He asks, motioning his head to a photo of what he's deduced to be Rachel's sister.

"Lucy."

"She in kindergarten yet?"

"Next year."

House nods solemnly. The low volume of what they're not watching seems to accentuate their mutual fear of this moment. Tense, Cuddy wants him to put the pieces together but he can't bear any more bad news this week. There are too many questions he doesn't want the answers to. He tells himself it won't make a difference and deflects.

"You seeing anybody?"

"No," she mumbles with a full mouth and content not to elaborate.

"What about you? You were married when I left."

"The honeymoon was over before… Well, we actually didn't have a honeymoon so I guess that idiom doesn't fit. It was a stupid ploy. I was just trying to hurt you. Since you fled, I assume it worked."

"I didn't leave because you married a hooker."

"No. It was because I called you in the middle of the night with my mangled leg bleeding out in a bathtub. I was trying to kill the pain and I was killing myself in the process. You couldn't stand to watch it anymore and I was too stubborn to stop."

"There's more to it than that, House. I was scared. I should never have left. You––I, I thought uprooting would solve everything and by the time it was clear that it couldn't, it was too late to go back."

"You were running away," he tells her softly. "Are you happy now?"

Their eyes meet then; her mouth opens aplogetic. He knows she can't answer. There's a sorrowful devotion in the way she's here for him now. He's grateful and resentful and confused.

"We should be getting back," comes out casually on the exhalation as he reaches for his cane, trying to hide how out of breath he is.

"Don't," she chokes out the syllable. "I mean you can stay here tonight."

For a long time there has been this uneasy premonition in the back of her mind, like a reoccurring nightmare. It always ends with him dying in a hospital bed.

Cuddy stands and carries the dirty dishes into the kitchen. When she comes back he's standing at the bottom of the staircase and not wearing his coat.

"You can sleep in my bed," she looks back to tell him, starting upstairs.

"I'll take the couch."

She feels stupid saying the words but she knows she's not going to sleep regardless. And he's pale, practically moribund with exhaustion. She waits for him to refuse, dissect her intentions. He only follows her quietly.

In her bedroom he stumbles, sighing at his discomfiture. Cuddy turns down the comforter as he sits on the edge of the mattress to step out of his sneakers. When she reaches for a spare pillow to take with her, he catches her wrist. There's love in the stillness of it and she leans to press her lips to his temple. After a long moment, his grip relents and she turns the lamp light out, lying down next to him. All at once House realizes he's wanted nothing more than a warm body next to him, her body his again.

Morning comes abrupt with her neck stiff from perching on the slant of his shoulder all night. She watches him sleep. He's hollow now compared to how he used to be. She wants to tell him to shave the beard but she's afraid of how sunken his cheeks are underneath.

There's never enough time; it telescopes misleading, all of it a lie. She doesn't know how much he has, how much they have together and tries to block the desolate thought as she slips out of bed.

The girls hear her up and they're up and so is he. When Cuddy comes back in, House turns on his side and watches her dress. It's not much but she's soft now in places where he remembers her being taut. Her breasts are a cup size bigger and he wants to break the silence to compliment the physiology of motherhood that has become her. It's always aroused him to think it, but to know now that he did that to her, even if he wasn't there for it, almost validates that small part of his psyche that wanted this then but could never admit it.

Before lunch, Cuddy makes a trip to oncology to ask the question she's terrified to know the answer to.

"I have to talk to you about the trial," she tells Dr. Ross.

Ross stands, conspicuously nervous in her presence.

"What is it?"

"One of the patients. Greg House."

"House," he repeats, sifting through his filing cabinet. He pulls out a folder.

"Yes, House."

He skims the page.

"How bad is he?"

A pause as Ross reads.

"I don't know how he got into the trial. He's been sick a long time. The cancer metastasized to his lungs more than a month ago. He's got six, maybe eight weeks."

"Even if the trial's a success?"

"Definitely. The medication is designed to accelerate the suicide of cancer cells before they're at this late a stage. I really don't know how he got into the trial."

"What would his odds be if he got a new lung?"

"Better. If the trial's effective for him and there are no complications with the transplant it could give him a few more years, maybe five. But the odds of a patient his age with his medical history getting approved for a lung ––"

Cuddy's gone. In her office she ignores calls and misses meetings, scrolling through the donor database. They only added House to the transplant list ten days before he got here. He's a five digit number at the bottom of the registry. She feels like she might vomit. There's panic and pain and she has to make this happen for him.

Hours later, when the sun has set and snowflakes are falling, Cuddy is too restless to keep looking through the tristate listings. She's about to call it all a waste of time but goes to see him instead. There's so much she has to tell him.

Scarcely composed when she comes in his room, she starts with his name.

"House."

One word at a time.

"Why didn't you tell me you needed a lung?"

"They're making me leave the trial." It's not even a question.

"No. They're not. But––"

He can see the light reflecting off of tears in the corners of her eyes.

"There's something you need to know, something I should have told you five years ago."

"I know," he interrupts. "I didn't know when you broke up with me but I knew when you left. It was the only excuse that made any sense."

"What? Why didn't you stop me, confront me?"

"I wanted you to tell me. Or maybe I didn't. You left because you didn't want me to be a part of it. You were afraid I'd ruin it, that I'd never be there."

A sob holds stagnant in her throat; she feels like she's suffocating.

"I was never opposed to being just a donor," his words echo hindsight.

"I only wish you'd asked me sooner."

"This was never how I wanted this to end," she tells him, wiping away tears blinding her because she refuses to blink, to break another promise or look away.

"I'm going to get you a new lung." She takes his cold hand in hers.

"You still love me." There's a tinge of surprise in his voice.

"Don't," he says, shaking his head. "It's only going to make this harder."

"How much harder can this get?"

"Are you really that naïve? How do you think this is going to end? Either I get better long enough for us to come together and fall apart and move on, again. Or I don't and you're left coping with the one time you couldn't save me from myself. I will––"

His mouth is dry, the lightheadedness back.

"I will never not be in love with you. But twenty-five years is a long time to clean up my messes and hold my hand. You were right to leave. You are better off without me."

"House, that's not true. I've wanted you here. I've wanted you here from the beginning. It took this long for me to realize it but I need you, _we_ need you in our lives.

I should have known this was never going to be perfect and it was never going to be easy and I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't stay. But I can do better now.

I'm going to find you a lung and you're going to come out of this clinical trial cancer free."

Cuddy unweaves her fingers from his and leaves feigning optimism. She hurries to the clinic to make sure he's not getting a placebo in the trial. Then she pulls up a patient list, more specifically people in ICU, the coma ward, organ donors who have been rejected. She knows she has to find a lung before the trial progresses farther. He's going to get weaker before he gets stronger.

The next three days it's the same fight. Him calling her irrational and idealistic and Cuddy reminding him of how many times he's beaten the odds. House endures the trial, the side effects, the guise of guinea pig he's taken on. She narrows down every list, waiting for somebody to die.

And they do: an old man with emphysema, an HIV patient with pneumonia, two children, one of which is old enough to donate but whose parents won't consent.

This is time running out, she thinks, unlocking the door as they get home late. She's getting too used to him beside her again. Except that's not what's tearing her apart.

In the middle of the night she gets out of bed, goes to Lucy's room and, staring down at the girl, wonders why she never considered someday this would be all she has left of House.

It isn't fair for either of them. Lucy's been asleep every night when they come home and Cuddy's torn. There's the instinct to protect her from the loss of growing close to somebody who is only going to go away. But she doesn't want to deny her either. House deserves to know his own daughter.

The possibility of reunion, however imperfect, of taking back what she said, admitting the truth, has tiptoed along a balance beam in her mind since she left. She thought it was going to be a matter of time before they made it right, not a matter of keeping him alive.

_**platonic **_

The week draws to an end and they've been together constantly. The morning drive in, at the hospital and every evening, always in a sort of wistful hush, as if they know that any minute the spell will break. They might lose each other forever.

One night when he can't resist, when the need outweighs the logic and hopelessness, when they're lying in bed with his body curled behind and into the warmth of hers, his dry lips descend on her neck, initiating.

His hand, the one that's been pressed to her hip for an hour, inches up the edge of her cotton tank. A thumbnail traces the swell of one breast. His teeth sink into her shoulder as he grinds against her, spurring her to touch him.

It always happens like this. The temptation, trysts and renunciations. He comes to her scared and empty and wounded and invulnerable. They fight it for as long as they can but it's quicksand.

Cuddy turns and he touches her moist open mouth with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious. It feels like their first kiss, tentative, forlorn. The thought passes fleeting and transluscent: she doesn't know what a life without this man, this arrogant, brilliant, broken man would be like. She'd give anything to never find out.

All she can do now is let his palm drift down her stomach and feel the horizontal line he draws over the c-section scar he doesn't need to see to know is there.

She isn't bothered by the beard as it etches along her jaw and reddens her nape. She squirms when his other arm tightens around her, bringing her close enough to feel him half hard against the dip of her spine. She's not sure where this is leading, if it's just heavy foreplay or if despite the cancer and all its treatments he can still do this. She lets him lead, lets him do what he needs.

House nestles his mouth against her ear but it's no diversion. Beneath the covers his wandering hand is winding her too tight. Her mind floods sensory with the memory of how many times he's undone her with a touch, a thrust, effortless.

The backs of her thighs are buttery soft. He smoothes his knuckles and pushes his way between them into the heat and the pressure. Leaning until his face is buried in the abundance of her dark hair, he whispers an appeal that gets lost in her sharp gasp.

The angle of his hand shifts, pressing into trembling tendons as they constrict around his fingers. The tips of two find that spot, all swollen and texture, and edge around it, taunting her. Her muscles flutter and though the door is closed, she holds back anything above the muted sound of a whimper.

His hand stills, fingers embedded and motionless. His lips are on her throat again. She can feel him, the subtle throb in the damp space between their bodies. She wants to kiss him. She cranes her neck to try but their lips only brush.

The impatient sway of her body drives his fingers in deeper and he pivots, eager for the friction. Then it's just quick shifts and short pushes until he's found the perfect angle, unrelenting and oblique. He can feel the first faint contractions of her impending orgasm, the definitive and fluid motion of her hips.

He slows, pulling his fingers out. He leans to brace himself above her and kiss her, all tender reminiscence.

He wants to believe they could stay this way close, enclosed, alone together. House holds his breath. He waits for that deceptive sense of well being to pass. More than anything he wants to be inside her. If he tries he knows he won't make it. His leg or his lungs might allow five or six thrusts before the weakness or the pain render him an invalid.

So he rolls onto his side, pulling her in front of him, spooning innocent as if his hand hasn't returned and his fingers aren't bending precision inside her, drawing spirals then pressing then circling again, without pattern and without stopping.

Lost in the thought of how much he's missed her, missed this, he starts to stroke faster, desperate. His head is hung over her shoulder, his mouth pressed to her upper lip. He watches it, surreal when she stiffens, jerks once, twice and comes so hard he's certain she's not been with anyone since him.

The tremors wane and as her arched back muscles relax, she turns. Her tongue follows a rivulet of sweat along his neck. His pulse is racing. She presses a gentle kiss to his closed lips and there's a distance. She can feel a poignant chaos welling within him.

He breathes in the smell of her sheets, the reality of being here and tries to hold onto it.. With her hand splayed over his chest he falls asleep spent and at home.

Cuddy lies awake contemplative.

What they have––impossible, convoluted as condemned, is making her consider that myth. The one Plato posited that held that humanity came to being as hermaphrodites until God split them in two and that everybody is wandering the world in search of our lost half. It's a romantic idea, she knows. For her and House it feels like it's happened in reverse. They started separate, on opposite sides of the world, him a military brat in the Philippines and her the brainy younger sister in Midwestern American suburbia. They found each other in Michigan, and again.

She doesn't believe in fate but it all has her heartstrings too tangled to be coincidence. Now he's here and they're closer than ever so that she feels that is he dies, she won't live. Some part of herself will go with him.

She knows she can't let that happen.


	2. lifelines

I want to thank all who left reviews. It keeps me writing.

Part 2/3

Notes: Set 5 years after season 7 and ignores everything after "After Hours."

**lifelines**

The end of December sleet blears the car window as they drive to the hospital. Cuddy's mind is reeling with what they did the night before, what she's still got to do, and why she didn't tell him sooner. The infarction, the ketamine, the breakup, none of it compares to the regret of excluding him from his own daughter's life.

The timeline replays, begging for any semblance of justification.

She considered telling him the night of the charity banquet, when it was just a suspicion, when his drunken sentimentality seemed the moral of their saga, the love story that two weeks later she would write the ending to.

But then there was the panic a few mornings after, the blood in her urine, the mass on the ultrasound. The test she knew they'd run before they did the surgery. They were discreet in delivering those results and it was confirmed. She was pregnant, probably dying and completely alone. She wanted to tell him but knew that she couldn't, not when it was all but guaranteed to fall away. Then somehow she was granted reprieve from that death sentence and a grim clarity came back. He was taking vicodin again and she was still pregnant despite all the procedures. He couldn't know and that meant she couldn't stay.

The night he called her, steeped in the bloody lunacy of his bathtub, she made it final. She left a voicemail accepting a position in Boston. She browsed for a good city school to enroll Rachel in. In two days he was out of recovery and she was packing her things. She drove through the weekend, tears streaming the distance of the interstate. The movers arrived before Cuddy and Rachel and put the furniture in all the wrong places. The snow was worse and the schools more expensive. From the beginning she knew they didn't belong.

Through her third trimester, as her emotions kaleidoscoped, doubt and regret conquered the milestone, the absolute miracle of the pregnancy. She dialed his number a dozen times but never pressed send. She wanted him to come to her, wondered anxiously if he would, if she asked him, pleaded, apologized.

Somehow she rationalized what she was doing. She told herself he wouldn't come, that he wouldn't want the obligation of a child. She reduced paternity to a technicality.

Cuddy gave birth at the beginning of January in a hospital that wasn't her own with only her mother and her sister gawking through the window at the newborn she'd name Lucy.

The trauma of loneliness came upon her when the endorphins ebbed away. There was no proud man pacing in the waiting room, no father to sign the birth certificate. That was the instant she knew how much it mattered, and that she had made the worst decision of their lives.

Back at the hospital, Cuddy does her best to take it as it comes. Every potential organ donor that passes through these doors, whether a vegetative prospect or a too unlucky incurable about to have their toe tag tied, she knows about it. It's all dead ends, but she knows about it.

To temper the downward spiral of his chances, she gets cc'd on the progress and setbacks of the trial. Some patients are leaving because of adverse effects. Insomnia is one of many. A few floors above her, despite his listlessness and tired burning eyes, House is wide awake waiting for her the rest of the night.

He considers going to her office, distracting and harassing her the way he used to do. He wants to be close to her. As much as it hurts, there's a sense of homecoming when he's with her, something that assuages the injury of the years they spent apart.

Instead though, he gropes for his phone. Too many hours he spent pining. And to who? He's sure Wilson knew she was here. Maybe he thought reconciling would make him better. Maybe he'd talked to Cuddy and knew more.

House calls him and thanks him for making him come to New York. He doesn't mention Cuddy but ends the long voicemail complaining that the hospital bed makes his leg hurt and that he's checking into a hotel with Wilson's credit card.

They said their goodbye before he got here. House has to punctuate it acrid.

Tonight she's early to his room, just a few minutes. He's got his eyes closed and his headphones on but he hears her. She brushes the ramp of his shin and he looks up at her. She's standing patient and ready, as if she hasn't been waiting for forever.

House can't decide if it's guilt or regret, another inexpressible boulder on his chest, but he knows she's always been standing there, waiting for him.

She always will be.

Her constancy and resolve, the vigils she kept and the lies she's told to protect him. She's his lifeline.

And he's the crippled shell of a man who could never live up to being the love of her life.

He limps out of the hospital with her by his side. She warms the car up, shifts into drive. In the passenger seat it comes upon him, less than an epiphany.

Everything could have been different. If had known then that this was how it would end. He would never have left Michigan.

One night.

It could have been the rest of their lives.

_**tomorrow**_

Their first time. The reason she fell in love with him: the infallibility of his approach, the way he danced that night. So few words but what he said he meant. The condescending cynicism fell away; the smug genius stood in the shadow of a brooding romantic.

Even then she could never tell what he was thinking, whether it was sabotage or seduction. He asked her to the hoedown. He picked her up after class. He held her close even when they weren't dancing. House was way off his ambitions, wanting her more every minute.

He hadn't escaped her daydreams since they met at the bookstore. Lust, she thought, an undeniable attraction, no profound love affair, no real expectations. She tried to forsake her self restraint.

Reaching for him through those faded jeans, brazen, nubile young Cuddy did little more than rasp her wrist against the pleat of his fly, tumultuous want yielding to uncoordinated affectation.

She didn't know what this was going to be: a first date, an inane hookup.

A catastrophe. He ran his index finger up her arm, drawing her back to him and she wondered if it wasn't going to be all three.

The sinews of House's heart were twisting too. He knew the inevitability of expulsion. He never expected he'd have a reason to stay. After tonight, he didn't know if he could leave.

"This weekend," he breathed down the slope of her cheek.

"I want to take you to the lake."

Cuddy buried her face in the shadow of his throat. They danced slow to the longest song, the breadth of an eternity.

Before midnight, their ears ringing, his arm slung tight around her back, they fled the noise and smoke, the crowd they stood out from. He led her to his car, turned the key, told himself this was just the beginning.

The feeling that something rare, delicate and unrepeatable was about to be wasted, he resisted. His hand slid between her knees and up her thigh, trying to fluster her into sticky exultation. On a whim, he leaned over, scraped his unshaved cheek against her ear and told her she was beautiful.

They sat quiet the next mile. He walked her to the door of her apartment and wavered there. It wasn't indecision. He recognized the perishable nature of love, saw it evanescing before his eyes, the frailty of youth and life and the memory it was all becoming.

Already he was kissing her. The porch lamp and moonlight cross hatched ocher and alabaster. Tripping over the doorstep with two whole legs, he lifted her off her feet. She kicked the door closed, his back up against it, and they stood excruciatingly still.

If they had been falling in love with each other, this was the irreversible, clumsy, shameless, agonizingly sudden stop.

They staggered in circles to her bedroom. He undressed her with the most fascinated affection so that even though it was a frenzied rush, he managed to memorize the architecture of her anatomy. A birthmark on her shoulder blade, a crescent scar on her elbow, the freckles in her eyes that, when he laid her down on the bed aligned like puzzle pieces, filling the jaded azure flecks in his.

He found the indent of her suprasternal notch and let his tongue loiter there until her fingers threaded through his hair and pulled. She made that sound, the guttural keening of aroused exasperation.

House would hear her make it again, countless times when she's Dean and they pretend this never happened, that it didn't mean anything.

He bit her bottom lip at the strain it took to penetrate her without imploding. Lightly he let his parched lips travel down her dark hair, wanting to asphyxiate himself in the perfume of it.

He concentrated on her breasts endlessly, steadily, his thumb rubbing over one nipple, teeth pulling the other into his mouth. His chin careened along the cleft in between, the half grown beard leaving all the tender skin of her chest a pale amaranth.

Then he returned to the burning bloom of her lips, the bittersweet aftertaste of every kiss. He started to move. Subtle, slow thrusts that made her dig her nails into his back. She breathed into his mouth, vodka and cherries and lingering sweetness.

He pushed deeper into the liquid ache that clutched at him, jutting shallow until her contractions grew greedier. A harsh shudder and she arched her back, taking and meeting each thrust.

She writhed restless, his sweat on her skin. For an infinitesimal fragment of a second it felt like she was becoming part of him. How alchemically they were making fated love out of human fantasy.

On a shorter stroke, almost thrumming above her, his abdomen angled to try and drum on her clit. She was like playing an instrument. He heard her voice rising, the little muffled cries incoherent. He put his lips to her throat and counted off her pulse.

With no transition he fell into long, bruising embedded thrusts. She let her tongue trail the length of his jugular, sucking intermittent until arriving at his open mouth. She kissed him worshipfully, the dry corners of his lips, the crease of his chin, his eyelids when his face contorted and he couldn't open them.

His body grated against hers, waiting. He felt it when she started to let go, a dense searing flutter, then trickling down her thighs. She half-sobbed, half-screamed his name as she came, slipping into that strange pleasure hum of perpetual motion that only ended when he hilted, stilled, and erupted in thick heat against her cervix.

His locked his hips made no effort to pull out. He thought––he didn't know what he was thinking. There was the hope that the viscous biology he hung immersed in was more abstract, that it bound them to more than tonight. She kissed his temple and smeared her forehead against his and he thought maybe, someday, she would understand.

House crushed her in mock collapse and she fell asleep clinging to tomorrow, waking up pinned under his weight, their weekend at the lake.

The carnal concomitance was demoted to a meaningless indiscretion instead. She woke up alone. No note, no message on the answering machine. She hated him for using her.

To spite herself, there to negate the hate, was the hope only of ever seeing him again.

_**human heir**_

The phone rings and Cuddy answers amid the chaos of coming through the door. Her sister had the girls for the day. Julia was supposed to bring them back just to put them in bed but the living room is a cluttered labyrinth. Rachel is upstairs brushing her teeth.

Lucy is tiptoeing behind House, her eyes shifting between her mother and his feet. House is watching her too when she walks in front of him, looks up and then looks down telling him, "Your shoe's untied."

Lucy bends to tie it, sedulously undoing and redoing the loop of his shoelace until finally knotting it in a way he knows will never come loose.

"Really?" He says. "It's a good thing you noticed."

She waits beside her mom a minute then looks back at him.

"I'm thirsty."

"You want me to get you something to drink?"

She nods an animated yes. He starts into the kitchen and gets her cup, pouring some juice. This isn't so hard, he thinks. His first conversation with his offspring and she isn't crying yet.

"Lucy," Cuddy exclaims, coming into the kitchen.

"What are you doing up?"

She raises her cup and giggles, her upper lip glistening a bright orange. After one last gulp she hands it to House and traipses back to bed.

"That was Samantha," Cuddy starts. "The babysitter. She still has the flu. She's not going to be able to watch them this weekend."

Any other time, Cuddy wouldn't care. She'd stay, get a little extra time with her girls and work from home. But with the contingency of House's arrival, her priorities have been skewed. She knows she has to be there if a donor becomes available. The new year is coming. The ER is going to be full of accidents, tragedies and resolutions gone awry.

"I don't mind babysitting," he offers.

A beat. He doesn't wince when he says it the way he used to do when they were together.

"It's two girls, are you sure?"

"It'll be fine. You used to let me watch Rachel."

"They're older now. Are you sure you feel up to it?"

"I'm fine. It's a weekend, Cuddy. And you're a phone call away."

"Okay," she caves. "If it's what you want."

She watches him the rest of the night, with a long-awaited awareness, the scene like a belated return. Why was he becoming the man she always wanted at the last minute?

The sound of her voice wakes him early Saturday morning. It's still dark outside. House is hugging her pillow, mouth gaping, drool pooling. She kisses him goodbye and walks out quietly, whispering,

"Get up soon. They don't have a snooze button."

He hauls himself out of bed a few minutes later, the cane holding him up but the stairs a perilous descent for a half conscious cripple. After he starts a pot of coffee, he finds the toaster.

There's a piece of bread between his lips when he turns around to see Rachel standing in front of him.

"What are you doing?" She asks.

"Making toast."

"No," she disagrees. "I mean, what are you doing here?"

"Samantha is sick."

"Oh," she drawls, having a seat at the counter.

"Don't worry, I'm not moving in. You want anything?"

"I usually have cereal," she tells him.

Lucy stumbles in then, rubbing her eyes. House opens the cupboard to find a row of cereal boxes.

"Which kind?" He asks Rachel.

She points. He grabs a bowl and spoon and milk and pours it all together.

"What about you kid?" He bows his head to ask Lucy.

"Waffles!"

He bends and lifts her up onto a stool then opens the freezer to find the waffles. Rachel is still watching him and he can't decipher whether it's disappointment or––

"You remember me?" He finally asks.

"Not really."

"Before you guys moved I was…" He considers.

"I worked with your mom."

It's counterfeit unrecognition. Rachel remembers him, remembers him and her mom together. For years she's overheard what her aunt and mother and grandmother have highlight about House and that, not her actual experiences with in, is tainting her perception of him now.

Lucy's waffles pop up from the toaster. House plates them quickly.

"You mom told me not to let you have too much of this," he starts, handing her the bottle of syrup.

"But as you'll find out, I'm not a big fan of moderation."

The day passes with surprising ease. House realizes they're at the perfect age. Old enough that there are no diapers to change, no dimes being swallowed, young enough still that there's no teenage rebellion or adolescent angst. He doesn't have to prescribe them birth control or slip them antibiotics for an infected piercing.

They sit and watch cartoons, play video games, have a bite for lunch and wait for Cuddy for dinner.

Near the end of the day, while House is cooking gnocchi, the aroma of fresh bread rising inspires an idea.

"Can you bake birthday cakes too?" Lucy asks.

"Depends," he tells her. "When's your birthday?"

"Friday!"

The dad destined to fall short might not survive to see his daughter turn five. On the cusp of feeling sorry for himself he asks:

"What's your favorite kind of cake?

She's still describing the colors and characters and tiers of intricacy when Cuddy comes through the door. They sit down together, resembling a family for the duration of one meal. After, she lets him tuck Lucy into bed.

The reality of it feels faraway from Cuddy. House crawls into bed and she curls up behind him, takes his hand, her fingers folding in under his. She falls into an uneasy sleep knowing only that she will never give up on him.

The night before he told the girls to keep it a secret so in the morning Cuddy kisses them goodbye and drives off unaware.

Around 10:30 the toy store delivers several large boxes. An hour later they're opened and assembled and a foosball table stands in the middle of the dining room. Miniature air hockey on the coffee table. Silly string and ice cream and trick candles come later.

He teaches them his defensive strategy, some flip of the wrist and when the girls get bored with foosball, they pair up for a new video game.

The three of them spend a memorable day together, a day outside the impeding grief. It's an early celebration for Lucy, a belated inheritance of paternity for him. He watches her closely, wondering how she'll grow to be like him, or be unlike him, what traits and ticks she'll develop, what mistakes and accomplishment she'll make.

The party ends with styrofoam peanuts between the couch cushions, icing on the carpet and all three of their blood sugars euphorically high. If he's alive Friday, he'll do it all again.

Breathless, House crashes to the couch, his legs buckling out from under him, the cane tipping to the floor. He reclines a long stretch, almost drowsing off. The girls are in their room, he thinks. He knows they're expecting their mom home soon.

Except when he opens his eyes, Lucy is on the couch beside him, her head tilted, watching him attentively.

"What's wrong?" He asks, assuming something is because why else would she be waiting for him like this.

Lucy shakes her head, grinning. She leans toward him and his first instinct is to pull away from the sticky mouth and tousled hair, but he can't.

She rings her arms around his neck in a swift grateful hug and mumbles a soft thank you, still chewing on cake. It's the sweetest, saddest thing he's let himself feel in the last five years. She climbs down off the couch, House holding her hand for balance.

You will always be the sum of what was good in me, he thinks. It comes out as you're welcome and be careful and goodnight as she stomps upstairs. He hates himself for not coming here sooner.

When he stands to finish the dishes, take out the garbage, he can feel his heart rattling around in his chest in large jagged pieces.

It's late when Cuddy gets home and though he tried to clean up, the place is a mess. She wades through it, dropping her briefcase and stepping out of her shoes before starting upstairs. She checks on the girls, sound asleep in their bunk beds. In her bedroom, she expects to find him sprawled snoring on top of the covers but the bed is empty.

She checks the bathroom and goes back downstairs. He's not in the living room either. The kitchen light flickers on. She finds him collapsed in front of the sink, unconscious and barely breathing.


	3. heartbeats

Notes: This is set 5 years after "After Hours" and season 7. Part 3/3. A fanmix and RPF can be found at my lj. (melissaisdown dot livejournal dotcom/47103dothtml) Otherwise, enjoy the conclusion. Reviews are welcomed and appreciated. Thanks for reading!

**heartbeats**

The drive to the hospital in the middle of the night with House's life hanging in the balance is a too familiar scene.

Cuddy's knuckles are white, clenching the steering wheel like it's the last thing she has to hold on to. This was never going to last. She has no idea what kind of perverse denial was making her think he'd get better.

Do you think I can fix myself? He asked back before any of this started. She's always loved him for his irreparability, the damage he's worn like a contemptuous shield around his soul. How many people has he saved and with what extreme measures only to become a casualty himself.

Silently, irrepressible. she weeps in the driver's seat and running the last red light, arriving to the hospital just behind the ambulance. Rachel and Lucy are half asleep in the backseat. Cuddy tries to compose herself before going inside.

With bloodshot eyes, clammy palms and the expectation that it is only going to get worse, she gets on the elevator. It's been less than two weeks since he stood behind her on this same elevator and she thought maybe that was him in her periphery, maybe he found her and it's not over.

What if he doesn't make it? The thought makes her sick.

The girls are with her assistant, napping on either side of the couch in her office. Cuddy's there when they wheel him into ICU, intubated. She's staring through the glass, watching fluorescent light scatter a halo above his tired broken frame.

Some attending whose name she can't pronounce walks up beside her. He starts to explain that House is stabilized but that this is the first stage of respiratory failure, that if he doesn't get a lung in the next 48 hours he won't make it. Then he mutters something about contacting his next of kin and Cuddy nods feebly, feeling like she is about to wake up and find it's all been a bad dream; she's in bed, in Princeton and this isn't happening.

_**some other life**_

In some other life she knows, she stayed. She waited a week after what he did to his leg. She told him in his office late one night. The disbelief in his eyes was outshone by a broad uncontrollable smile.

The next days he beamed. He bragged to Wilson and sent out a hospital- wide memo about knocking her up. She told him at twelve weeks. At sixteen the heartbeat was weak. But by twenty there was respite. Cuddy could finally tell Rachel to expect a sister.

Cuddy's diet boomeranged between donuts, decaf and tofutti and, through the most unusual cravings, the fiercest moods, the fear of not making it to term, he was there for her. He rubbed her feet, kissed her belly, kept her healthy and almost relieved. Fatherhood was becoming a reason to stay off vicodin. Cuddy was ready for a relapse but it never came. House had a distraction, a conviction outside medicine. He was happy and with her and ironically overwhelmed when she went into labor.

He stayed with them every night the first two weeks after they took Lucy home. He didn't move in though, both cherishing the escape plan of his apartment and reluctant to jinx it by pretending anything might be permanent. He didn't know what they were now. They never officially segued back into a real relationship. What they had was working.

She wasn't alone with an infant this time. And although the way he handled Lucy was at first almost clinical, Cuddy gave him space and the attachment came. They both worked too many hours , he knew and devised a system of taking turns, sometimes sneaking her into work.

She took her first steps inside the hospital, with uncle Jimmy babysitting. She looked like House with the blue eyes and square chin and her mother's dark hair gradually growing in.

In this life, when the tumors came back they were benign. It was just another incision, another scar, their business as usual.

Five years later he was teaching Lucy long division and driving Rachel to dance recitals. They were married. No ceremony, no honeymoon, just two signatures to solidify what it took twenty five years and countless mistakes to make right, to make real.

In the mistake of the present, Cuddy reminds herself what she would give to keep him here. She knows they're not the same blood type. This couldn't be that easy. Her mind races, out of options.

The idea of him returning to her just to be lost again is followed in quick succession by the thought of her making that quiet phone call to Wilson, of funeral arrangements, an unworthy elegy she makes herself write, the sheet of paper drenched with tears.

She thinks of Lucy on his piano bench, the lake he'd promised decades ago to take her to. She thinks of Mont St. Michel and the night she left Lucas.

The infarction too bleeds at the edges like an overexposed photograph. Her heart's in a constant turbulent riot, convinced that if she hadn't made that decision then, imploring Stacy––if he hadn't been misdiagnosed, golfing in Princeton, manipulated and deceived into a surgery he didn't want––he wouldn't be here now.

How many times she's saved him, breathed life back into him, made his heart beat again. It will never make up for what she's taken from him: the muscle debribement, a relationship he was willing to make work, his own flesh and blood.

_**asystole**_

A few hours pass. House wakes up wishing he wouldn't have. Everything is impossibly worse. He knew it would be, knew the price to be paid for the weekend he spent as a human being. Back to being a lab rat, a pin cushion.

He's returned to his hospital bed after another barrage of tests. His body's giving up. He's going to suffocate because of something he injected himself with years ago and he's going to be in pain until the end.

There's no delusion this time about Cuddy being his savior. He knows she tried. She's still trying. The heartrending futility of it is watching her watch him die. He can't stand another second of it so he shuts his eyes, maxes out his morphine and wonders if it will be the last time.

While House is tendering his existential resignation, Cuddy is having a long conversation with the nineteen year old daughter of a comatose car accident victim. He's been here three days. Cuddy's trying not to circle like a vulture. The man is four years House's junior and though the brain damage is irreparable, his lungs are unharmed. He'll never wake up, Cuddy explains in her clinical-compassionate way, knowing just as well this is House's last hope.

The girl refuses. Cuddy explains again, with more blatant apathy, that he's already dead; the insurance isn't going to pay to keep him on life support another day. She tells her she has a decision to make and her father could save someone else's––

The girl won't listen; she stands firm, refusing to relinquish her dad's lungs. She's not touting religion or any moral principle, she just wants him to be whole when they bury him.

Cuddy storms out then, devastated as furious. She paces, too restless to know what else to do. Staring up the clock, she forces her head to clear. She considers what House would do, the laws he would break, the risks he would take, the reckless, wrong, indefensible way he would save _her_ life.

Led by some desire that transcends personal interest, that defies all sound judgment, she starts back to that room. From the outside she can see the daughter saying goodbye. She's not going to stay the night. Cuddy turns back. It will be easier to fabricate the paperwork than start a fist fight.

She goes to see him, She's glad he's asleep; the spindling pulp of her emotions has tears blurring her vision. They roll onto her index finger as she tries to catch them without smearing her mascara.

The sight of House sick and fading, his life reduced to a weak sine wave on a monitor is all she needs to make the decision. It may cost her her job, maybe her license but it's no less than what he would risk. Hers is a boundless unequivocal devotion, true undying love. He means more to her than any of it.

The middle of the next day, Cuddy comes in, interrupting the nurse sent to disconnect the comatose father's respirator and bypass. Cuddy gives her an errand to run and puts the forged consent form at the foot of his hospital bed, wheeling him to the OR herself. In a few hours the lungs are excised, procured, put on ice.

An orderly wakes House up, jarring him out of some opiate dream that loops with its vignetted edges and the pain at a distance. Cuddy is standing behind her by the time his eyes focus.

"They're prepping you for surgery." The calm's regained in her voice.

"How?" He asks.

She glares at him, her head dipping. She bites her lip. He has some idea of the consequences. He wants to tell her it isn't worth it.

Fussing with his chart, she distracts herself from answering. She never could be persuaded to quit the cause that is Greg House, no matter how bleak.

"The trial's made a difference. The cancer's almost gone. After the transplant…"

Even she isn't sure how she made it happen.

"It isn't going to be easy but––"

There she is, he thinks, with that presumptive future tense.

"You can stay with me and the girls while you recover. And when you're ready, get back to work."

He's worked for her and against her. She called him a hospital asset and an ass but he was the heartbeat of everything, a challenge, a lifeline, what she looked forward to the most everyday. She wants it back, wants to go back. He can almost hear the tiny hairline fractures as they splinter, what this is doing to her heart.

"Thank you," he says, his eyelids heavy. The morphine is a slow curtain to raise.

She turns. There's not enough time to tell him everything. This is it.

"Cuddy," he calls out to her. "If I don't––"

He struggles for a deep breath.

"I just wanted to live long enough for her to remember me."

"You will," her voices trembles as she walks over to his bedside.

She leans down, trying on a mournful smile, and presses her lips to his. With agonizing clarity, she relives all that has ever been between them, a growing morbid pathos threatening to eclipse the levity and irony and love––

Her tears feel warm as they fall on his forearm. The burden of tearing herself away from them together, from this, their last kiss, is unbearable. She'd rather lay down beside him and die than feel this helpless.

His arm around her waist retracts. He closes his eyes, his palm pulling away from hers. Then she's standing alone in the middle of the empty room and for the first time since he go here, it's out of her hands.

The surgery executes textbook flawless, not a single complication. Cuddy watches every hour of it, from the first incision to the last suture.

As if it was only a matter of time, the first wave of horror has passed. When she does step out of the operating room, the Chairman of the Board of hospital directors is there, his cheeks a livid crimson.

"Lisa, is it true? You forged paperwork for a desperate transplant patient?"

She strains to swallow, says 'Yes' on the exhalation.

"I'm sorry but we can't keep you on after you've done something like this. Have your office cleaned out by noon. The committee will decide what other disciplinary measures need to be taken."

She nods rigid. It comes like a fist to an unsuspecting gut. But it's over, it's all over and he's stable, alive, in recovery.

It will be a long convalescence. She's going to have time off and maybe they can make what time he has left count. They're looking at years in the single digits, an endless course of immunosuppressants. It's going to be the hardest, longest struggle they've ever faced. She can only be grateful they're facing it together.

"That was a hell of a sacrifice," she can hear him saying in a few hours when he comes out of the anesthesia, breathes deep and sees right through her.

With everything she's lost, the miracle she's made happen breaks through. Cuddy goes to him in recovery, falls asleep with her arm stretched across him, her fingers twined steadfast with his.

Before they know it, spring has come. The winter they thought would never end is far enough away that they feel safe. They plan an escape.

The girls stay with her sister. House won't tell her where they're going. They cross four states in one long day. Miles outside Ann Arbor, she still doesn't know what he's plotting.

When she asks, he intones fake profundities about their destination, struggling not to sound sentimental. Really he's been overwhelmed with nostalgic retrospection since this all began, the promise he never meant to break.

"This was supposed to be our second date," he murmurs, vague and romantic.

He knows it's not Normandy. Cuddy reacts slowly and he's afraid he's disappointed her or that she's forgotten until she squeezes his hand in a way that tells him she'll never let go. He parks and they walk to secluded shade on a knoll nodding up from the lake.

Honeysuckle and magnolia suffuse the tepid dusk. A sharp, lovesick awareness scythes through her. How close she came to losing him. How he brought her here at last, the solace of surviving a conspiracy of defeat.

Her eyes fill with tears as they sit. He's peering over his bent knees at the lucent sun, its reflection in the water, the cast shadows of the trees. He breathes easy and when she can no longer hold back, her arms wrap around him in shuddering, unmistakable relief.

When she wakes, it's as a visitor not an administrator. And when she finally forces herself to walk away, go pack her things and call the babysitter, as she's walking away, almost to the elevator, she hears it. The EKG falters, seizes, blares, flatlining.

The world ends in the rush back to him, the edge of time unravels. The sterile corridor fades into an opaque haze. A violent panic stalls her intervention. She doesn't know if she's strong enough to watch him die.

This is all their love's ever been––rushing into to a burning building with him, for him, time and again.

She has to vindicate her sacrifice. She _has_ to save his life.

Cuddy tears open the curtain and pulls the paddles away from a nurse looming over the crash cart. His heart's between her two clenched fists, the way it always is. She charges and clears and shocks him once, twice.

"Come on," she cries when she thinks she hears him breathing.

"Please, House."

She starts into chest compressions. Another minute passes and still no pulse. The defibrillator scorches his chest the higher she turns the voltage, but nothing––and again. His attending is pulling at her, telling her to stop but she can't hear him, can't hear anything save for the beating of her heart.


End file.
